THE HOME SONG STORIES
Director: Tony Ayres Stars: Joan Chen, Steve Vidler, Joel Lok Irene Chen, Kerry Walker, Qi Yuwu, Jamie Oxenbould
Reviewed by PETER MALONE
If you google Tony Ayres, you will find an article from The Age by Anne Crawford (April 4th, 2003), ‘Going Beyond the Pale’. She gives an overview of his life: his unstable mother, a Hong Kong singer who married an Australian sailor and came to live in Melbourne, walking out on him and going to Sydney, eventually returning to Melbourne. She was suicidal and ultimately successful. She had her two children, a boy and a girl always in tow. At the end of the article, she mentions that Ayres was starting work on a new film, Home Song Stories. Over four years later, the film is being released. And Anne Crawford’s biographical summary is almost exactly a brief synopsis of the film.
Ayres had directed Walking On Water, a sensitive film about a young man dying of AIDS. Home Song Stories is written and directed by him. He invests a great deal of energy into this portrait of his mother and of himself as a little boy.
The fascinating aspect of this memoir is the characterisation of the young boy, Tom (Joel Lok). Much of the action is shown from his point of view. At other times, the camera is focused on his face, often Orientally impassive, but now and again revealing, especially through his eyes, both his gaze and his glances, that he sees clearly what is going on. This is especially true of his appraisal of his mother (Joan Chen), of her relationship with young local waiter, Joe. The audience is invited to share his emotional and mental judgments.
It is dangerous to speculate too deeply on the psychology of a pre-adolescent child. However, the portrait of Tom is so well done that it is difficult to resist the temptation.
In The Home Song Stories, Tom is possibly ten. In terms of nurture, he has a terrible life with his crazily emotional mother. He has learned a control which manifests itself in a logical manner with outbursts of chaotic emotion: angry shouting attacks on his mother, weeping in the school toilet (weeping is something he never does) when he overhears his school friend mocking his mother).
However, it is clear from the writing and performance that Tom is an introverted boy, able to be by himself, getting energy more from his inner world than the dysfunctional outer world. Interestingly, Anne Crawford in her Age article on Tony Ayres has an insightful description of the man himself which gives a clue to Tom’s character: a self-depreciating humour and warmth – and a subversive mind.
Tom’s inner world is one of imagination and thought. We are alerted to this early by his surprising fantasy suddenly dramatised on screen: he is a martial arts warrior in conflict with a villain – who turns out to be his adoptive father’s mother with whom the family lives and who clearly disapproves of her son’s marriage as well as not understanding, or wanting to understand, Chinese manners and traditions. He vanquishes her. He will later have another fantasy with an unseen foe (which is inserted just after some difficulties with his mother’s latest boyfriend from the restaurant).
And he reads all the time, Chinese comics but also the Encyclopedia. He wants to read it from beginning to end, so that he will know everything.
The film opens and closes with Tom at his desk writing his memoirs and his often rueful tribute to his mother. This is what he knows and does best. His sister, who managed the disruption and traumas more openly than her brother, is now a psychologist. She reaches out to others in personal interaction. Tom is alive in his inner life and wants to communicate this vitality and insight.
This is a film which should fascinate Australian and Chinese audiences, an opportunity to look at race relations in retrospect as well as dysfunctional relationships.